Book Blob (Abstract Colour-Blob Literary Fiction Cover)

• Fill the jacket with soft organic shapes in three to six saturated colours (cobalt, hot pink, orange-red, deep green, mustard), most often overlapping edge to edge so that overlaps and blurred or brushed edges make new hues. Or let one cluster of shapes or a single figure rise over a flat coloured ground (grey on The Death of Vivek Oji, mustard on The Beauty of Your Face), or scatter flat cut-out shapes in one colour (birds, fish, leaves, fruit) all over a black ground, as on Such a Fun Age. Never a white page: no paper-white margin, panel or frame.
• Suggest people instead of showing them: let a few shapes converge into a profile, an eye, lips or a braid that rewards a second look, like the two sisters' faces in The Vanishing Half or the eyes and mouths of Detransition, Baby. Never put a photograph or a specific face on the cover, so that as many readers as possible can see themselves in it.
• Set the title and the author's name very large in sturdy capitals, a plain sans in white or cream, one or two words to a line. Stack them or spread them across the width so they can still be read when the cover shrinks to a thumbnail on a retail app or a phone screen.
• Add one small handwritten line, such as 'a novel', 'a memoir' or 'author of Freshwater', in a loose script. It is the only intimate touch against the big capitals.
• Give the colour a made-by-hand surface where flat fills would look generic: brushed paint (The Death of Vivek Oji), watercolour bloom (The Beauty of Your Face), grain (Detransition, Baby) or streaks of gold (You Exist Too Much).
• Expect the cover to be read as one of a set: the shared look tells a browser 'if you liked The Vanishing Half, you might also like this'. To stop it being generic, draw the shapes from the book's own story.

US literary-fiction publishing, above all the Big Five houses (Print, 2021). In 2019 Margot Boyer-Dry's Vulture piece 'Welcome to the Bold and Blocky Instagram Era of Book Covers' tracked the bright, Instagram-friendly covers she had begun to notice with the diagonal rainbow stripes and bold white title of Meg Wolitzer's The Female Persuasion (Riverhead Books, 2018). She traced them to Riverhead Books (Penguin Random House), whose art director, Helen Yentus (transcribed 'Helen Giantess' by On the Media), explained, as Boyer-Dry relays it, that a book 'needs to render well in every environment'. On the Media (2022) presents the blobs as the later form of that look. In January 2020 Jeva Lange called 'blobs of suggestive colors' the hottest trend in book covers (The Week). Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half (Riverhead, June 2020), with a cover by Lauren Peters-Collaer, became one of its most cited examples. In September 2021 Print called the trend 'well into its third or fourth year in the major publishing houses', a count that points to a start around 2018. Defector (2024) dates its moment to 2019–2023; toward its end, On the Media (December 2022) heard newer literary covers turning to cooler, moodier palettes, and Defector saw old-timey animal drawings replacing the blobs. The sources and exemplars here are all US editions, so the record is US-centred: it does not show whether, or how far, publishers elsewhere took up the look.

1. R. E. Hawley, 'Behold, the Book Blob', PRINT (23 September 2021): https://www.printmag.com/book-covers/the-book-cover-behold-the-book-blob (the description of 'amorphous daubs of warm, bright color' overlapping into new hues, implied braids, eyes or a woman's face, 'a blocky but refined sans serif' title and small handwritten 'a novel', 'a memoir' or 'a New York Times bestseller'; 'well into its third or fourth year in the major publishing houses'; the nicknames by Jeva Lange, Alana Pockros ('unicorn frappuccino cover') and Kyle Chayka ('the Zombie Formalism of book covers'); books 'nearly always written by women, often women of color' from the Big Five; Boyer-Dry on 'safer choices'; The Vanishing Half, You Exist Too Much and The Death of Vivek Oji as grouped comparative titles; Rachel Ake Kuech's Detransition, Baby as 'genuinely masterful work'; the 'safe' route 'disproportionately taken in service of women of color and debut authors')
2. Jeva Lange, 'The hottest trend in book covers is colorful blobs', The Week (15 January 2020): https://theweek.com/articles/889334/hottest-trend-book-covers-colorful-blobs (names the trend 'blobs of suggestive colors' as successor to the headless-woman, women's-backs and flat-woman covers; blobs 'often come in womanish shapes'; Sahar Mustafah's The Beauty of Your Face as a case where it 'totally makes sense'; Lange on herself: 'the overload of clashing colors makes me, a chromophile, delighted')
3. On the Media (WNYC Studios), 'The Story Behind the Book Cover Blobs', with Margot Boyer-Dry (16 September 2022), reaired as 'Why So Many Book Covers Look the Same' (30 December 2022): https://wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/story-behind-book-cover-blobs-on-the-media and https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/why-so-many-book-covers-look-same-on-the-media (Boyer-Dry's 2019 Vulture piece 'Welcome to the Bold and Blocky Instagram Era of Book Covers'; The Female Persuasion's 'diagonal rainbow stripes' as her starting point; the bright, Instagram-worthy covers of 2019 traced to Riverhead Books and evolving into the blobs; Boyer-Dry relaying the art director (named 'Helen Giantess' only in Brooke Gladstone's narration): 'the way that she explains it is that a book needs to render well in every environment' and covers as 'teeny, tiny thumbnails'; newer covers in 'a cooler, moodier palette')
4. Trish Rooney, 'Why Do All Books Suddenly Look the Same?', InsideHook (24 May 2022): https://www.insidehook.com/article/books/why-all-books-suddenly-look-same ('electric blues, earthy greens, maybe pops of pinks and splashes of red' under a 'plain white font'; cover credits for The Vanishing Half (Lauren Peters-Collaer) and Detransition, Baby (Rachel Ake Kuech) and their hidden faces; Lynn Buckley's Untamed, with Glennon Doyle's post crediting Leslie David's art; Buckley: 'It has to look good in the thumbnail and Amazon'; Boyer-Dry in Vulture quoted on covers that must 'look great in miniature')
5. Patrick Redford, Defector (27 August 2024), on the shift from blobs to old-timey animals: https://defector.com/the-new-trend-in-book-covers-is-old-timey-animals (the blob in new-fiction sections 'between 2019 and 2023'; preceded by 'the two-dimensional color block meta and the headless woman fad'; Detransition, Baby and Such a Fun Age as 'two prime examples'; Lauren Peters-Collaer as designer of The Vanishing Half; designer Elisha Zepeda on blob covers as 'very boring to design' and on publishers not wanting 'to show a particular face')
6. Publishers Weekly, Star Watch update on Helen Yentus (8 May 2019): https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/people/article/79979-star-watch-keeping-up-with-helen-yentus.html ('Today, Yentus continues as the art director at Riverhead'); and John Maher, 'Don't Call Riverhead Design Labs Just Another Art Department', Publishers Weekly (26 August 2016)
7. Wikipedia: 'The Vanishing Half' (cover artist Lauren Peters-Collaer; Riverhead Books, 2 June 2020), 'Detransition, Baby' (One World, 12 January 2021; cover file credited to Rachel Ake Kuech), 'Such a Fun Age' (cover artist Vi-An Nguyen; G. P. Putnam's Sons, 31 December 2019), 'The Death of Vivek Oji' (Riverhead Books, 4 August 2020), 'Zaina Arafat' (You Exist Too Much, Catapult, 2020); Open Library records for The Beauty of Your Face (W. W. Norton, 2020), The Female Persuasion (Riverhead, 2018) and Untamed (The Dial Press, 2020). Cover images of all eight books viewed for the descriptions (Wikipedia's first-edition covers of The Vanishing Half and Detransition, Baby; Open Library covers for the others); the palette is sampled from The Vanishing Half

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